For those of you who did NOT attend my recent seminars in the Northwest, here are a few items you missed!
For those of you who attended, as promised, here are the specific references and places to go for the information that was not included in your notepacket.
Tom
P.S. If you did NOT attend my recent seminar, be sure to read the bottom of this post for a Special Offer!!
P.S.S. Seminar attendees — I used this picture above to stimulate your memory to…stop giving it all away! 
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Too many chiropractors have a lingering problem with debt in their office — and it is literally killing their practice and their profits.
By debt, I am not talking about how much you owe on your student loans, your credit card or even how much business debt you may have due to capital expansion loans, lines of credit, etc.
The debt to which I am referring is bad debt, as in, uncollected accounts receivable. In other words, services you have already performed, but for which payment has not yet materialized. Read More
Today’s column is about 10 things you may have missed in 2010. The bad news is that I can’t tell you why you missed them. Could be you have your head firmly planted in the sand and ignore all that goes on around you. Or maybe you’re too busy putting out fires. Perhaps you spent the year chasing the “good”, while letting the “great” slip through your fingers. The good news is that this is 2011, a new year and another chance to correct what was lacking in 2010.
5 of these “missed” items are things chiropractors routinely miss or ignore; 5 are my top five blog posts of 2010 you definitely don’t want to miss or ignore. Read More
1) Medicare deductible. We’ll start with an easy one! The new Medicare Part B deductible will be $162.00, starting January 1, 2011
2) Begin Conversion to 5010 Format. For all offices filing payments electronically, you will have to convert to the new 5010 format by 2012. Read More
For those of you who are wondering why I am devoting three blog posts to the Chiropractic Comparative Billing Report, it is this: even if you did not receive a CBR, there is a wealth of opportunity and danger in the data derived from the CBR. Put simply, Medicare has sent the CBR as warning signal (for some of you) that what you are communicating to Medicare (and other payers) may not comply with guidelines and meet the requirements you need to get paid.
While none of your results from the tables or graphs from the CBR should be viewed as a problem in and of itself, there are a few “dangerous” conclusions that you definitely do not want drawn from your practice patterns – whether or not you received a CBR. Read More
In Part One of this post, we discussed how to interpret some of the data from the Chiropractic Comparative Billing Report issued recently by Medicare to 5000 DC’s around the USA as well as made some proactive suggestions for improvement.
In this installment, we will discuss the data from the remainder of the Comparative Billing Report (Figure 2 and 3) as well as how to draw some conclusions from the CBR data about your practice. Read More
This past week or so, 5000 chiropractors nationwide received a “present” in the mail in the form of a Chiropractic Comparative Billing Report (CBR). Even though I had previously reported that this would happen (see my previous post “Medicare Releases Chiropractic’s Comparative Billing Report Pilot”), my email inbox now knows what it must feel like to be a postal carrier during the holiday season.
Although, the CBR is not punitive or an audit per se, the report has certainly stirred up strong feelings in our profession and got a whole lot of people suddenly worried about their billing practices and level of audit risk.
At this point, it is not humanly possible for me to respond to all the emails that I have received on the CBR from the profession at large.
However, I will offer the following blog post to address many of the common concerns and questions I have received from chiropractors wondering what to do about their CBR. Read More
Wondering if the recession has hit your practice and your wallet as much as other DC’s or even MD’s?
Let me be the first to tell you that spending time calling up your DC friends or commiserating at your local seminars on how bad things are due to the current economy can not only be potentially depressing, it is almost always completely useless!
First, hate to say it, but your “friends” lie. If they are doing fine and think you are not, they lie to make it seem like things are tougher than reality. After all, why kick a man when he’s down? By the very fact that you ask the question, it’s obvious you’re hurting. I will admit – at least your friend is a nice person and they want to spare your feelings. But, you probably won’t get a truthful response.
Other friends lie because they too are in the toilet but they don’t want to admit it. Instead of actually doing something that is revenue generating for themselves, they will give you a handful of advice that didn’t work for them and act as if their practice is fine. This gives them the air of superiority. In reality, their practice stinks and the advice they gave is either terrible or may in fact work, but they wouldn’t know. They didn’t try it. Again, their response is less than truthful.
So now that we have established that there really is no reason to have the “are things bad in your office too?” conversation, why compare at all?
The answer is this: to study trends and glean insight from businesses that ARE thriving. Read More
Beware: pirates are attempting to steal your insurance checks!
If you have recently opened the mail only to realize that you seem to be a “participating provider” with insurance companies that you never heard of, you are certainly not alone. While it may seem silly to complain about being paid, the fact is that you are paid a contracted rate (which is sure to be less than your billed amount) for a contract that never existed. In other words, the payer has given you a “Wrongful Discount” because you never agreed to a discount in the first place!
This phenomenon – known as a “Silent PPO” – is just one of the latest in third party payer’s bag of pirate tricks aimed at reducing your payments. Unfortunately, it is becoming an increasingly common occurrence in the field of medical billing. (Yes, that means that it’s not just the chiropractors that are being picked on!) Read More
I have been receiving lots of questions lately about these continual PECOS notices that we have all been getting from Medicare. If these enrollment “warnings” have been getting under your skin or just getting you plain confused as to whether these apply to you or not, keep reading.
Here’s a summary of what is going on: Read More
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